Competition grows and Amazon drops the price of its Kindle device by $60, which means the e-Book reader is now for $299. It is believed that the 17 % slash in the price has come with the economic slowdown and stiff competition from the new players in the e-Book market.
For instance:
- Amazon will be facing competition from Plastic Logic and FirstPaper. Both companies are developing similar competing products.
- Scribd had launched an e-commerce publishing marketplace in May as a complement to its free content-sharing platform. Scribd boasts more than 60 million readers a month.
- Google is to soon enter the e-book market enabling publishers to sell digital versions of their latest titles directly to consumers.
Google is aiming to build a “digital book ecosystem” to allow partner publishers to sell access to their titles, even if buyers don’t have dedicated book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle or Sony Corp.’s Reader. This means that with Google’s new program, you will be able to read eBooks on any device – be it a PC, mobile phone or a dedicated eBook reader. You could temporarily cache them in your Internet browsers and also read them offline.
Google will start charging users to view some full text books that they’ve indexed (this is separate from the Google Book Search Library Project). Google would allow publishers to set a list price for books, although the company will reserve the right to discount titles at its own expense.
Well, there is definite competition, however, the analysts believe that Amazon’s Kindle still has an edge over all others.